Why medicine often has dangerous side effects for women

Surprising but true: Many of the medicines we all take -- common treatments like Ambien and everyday aspirin -- were only ever tested on men. And the unknown side effects for women can be dangerous, even deadly. Alyson McGregor studies the differences between male and female patients' bodies; in this fascinating talk she explains how the male patient became a blank slate for medical research ... and what all of us, women and men, need to ask our doctors to get the right care.

The Women's Court Initiative

Over the course of the past few years there have been some very exciting developments for women in the Balkans and as such, for women everywhere. TheWomen in Black led the Women's Court Initiative to support women in redefining and achieving justice for their war experiences and creating testimony of some of the women. There was a great deal of effort in creating services leading up to the testimony as this is a very dangerous thing for the women to do and the women needed a great deal of preparation and protection. Without protection their lives were in danger. This was begun by providing leadership development trainings in 7 countries to prepare 45 women witnesses and prosecutors to testify about their experiences during and after the war. The women were also provided Self Care for the severe symptoms they still suffer from the rape and torture. In 2011 alone about 200 women's groups organized over 100 events mobilizing 2,000 women participants in cities throughout the Balkans -- the goal being to raise awareness of the Women's Court.

How Colombians Wage Peace

"I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy." (Rabindranath Tagore)

Women, War and What they fed the children.

"There is no greater burden that carrying an untold story." Maya Angelou

Eighty percent of the world’s refugees and internally displaced people are women and children.

In order to humanize these statistics, we are gathering stories of women and children from around the world who have experienced war or live in war impacted areas. In this project, we are not looking at politics or perpetrators, we are simply sharing stories of experience. And, we help where we can to resolve symptoms of toxic stress as well as offering resources toward re-mediating other problems. our goals are publicizing stories and building resilience and sustainability of gains made by our story tellers by engaging in our program.

The Calming Breath

Psycho-neurobiology tells us that traumatic stress from an incident or chronic high stress conditions puts our bodies into survival – fight, flee, run like crazy or hide. Most of us know this. When Fight or Flee is the constant, the parasympathetic nervous system that stimulates self soothing hormones is weakened and we lose the ability to sooth and comfort ourselves.

The next go-to place for self-soothing becomes drugs, alcohol and high risk behavior. High risk behavior stresses the body so severely that the exhausted self soothing hormones will give what it can to the cause. Now that is the most simple way of understanding this dynamic and should explain why some of our PTSD combat veterans get hooked on the cycle of sever stress - relax. We can become addicted to our own bodies chemistry. So how do we take care of one half of the problem: One of the first and best ways to strengthen the self soothing system is by consciously slowing the breath to about six breaths a minute– this easy method is used in disaster areas and war zones with great success. A great way to learn the Calming Breath is by blowing bubbles -- children can be directly helped this way. Keep Bubbles in your Emergency Art Kit. The Emergency Art Kit.

Spirit Houses

Here's how one of us did this. We will call her Barbara, who didn't want to build a spirit house from scratch (some people will) so she looked around for an appropriate structure. Nothing there in her house but while walking in the pasture she found/remembered a birdhouse...perfect, that would do. Only not that specific bird house. It was occupied and she didn't want to evict the birds that were already living there so she took the idea and went to yard sales and feed and garden stores and looked on line until she found a bird house that fit for her Spirit House.

An Offering of Beauty to Life

Giving gifts to life.

Consider this -- Balinese make beautiful handmade offerings every single day to entice, appease and appeal to the Spirits -- to keep the world in balance. To bring good fortune. To show appreciation and gratitude.

Who We Are

We make art in order not to die from the truth.

Ashlar Center for Narrative Arts is a U.S. 501c3 non-profit organization designed to serve the personal story and address the trauma it may contain. Our work is educational and skills driven -- grounded in thirty years of community based experience.

We use photos, interviews, and teach guided writing (Writing Through the Body). For those people for whom revealing identity is unsafe or who are non-literate, they are offered an opportunity to build a multi-media piece to contain and share the story in an abstract or symbolic form. Our goal is Witnessing and facilitating the creation of a coherent narrative for our students as they move with us toward well-being and resilience.

Following from our initial work with Story, we collaborate with students to create a culturally relevant Self-Care program facilitated by them.